When I completed the Memorial To Commemorate The Chinese Railroad Workers Of Canada, I was admonished by the city’s historical society for not concentrating on its permanency. They wanted the monument to last not 100, but 500 years.

But how long is too long for public art? The Soviet Union removed its images of Stalin and Lenin. Saddam Hussein sculptures fell to the mob. Representations of American Civil War “heroes” are under debate. John A. Macdonald may be next.

It is also agreed today, in public art circles, that if you want to be critical, political and meaningful within the world of public art, it is only possible in the transitory. Here, the political is only tolerated as long as it will soon be removed.

The most impermanent of all public works of art might be the dusk to dawn Nuit Blanche scheduled this coming weekend. Twelve hours is the life span of each piece. Of course, most of them have a performative aspect, and those that could be called “public sculpture” are rare.

But impermanency is unequivocally one night. Any public work produced with the condition of its disappearance should be free, allowed to be disruptive. What it lacks in permanency it should make up for in impact. And so, Nuit Blanche should be the freest. No need here to worry about restricting the dialogue.

In the past Nuit Blanche has been generally devoid of any direct political art. This conservatism could possibly be attributed to the influence of the festival’s previous sponsor, Scotiabank.

So will this year’s Nuit Blanche be political? At Nathan Phillips Square, an appropriate location for the political, the major work Monument To The Century Of Revolutions will be mounted in shipping containers care of the Russian collective Chto Delat.

Half of these display containers will be dedicated to representing historical revolutions and the other half given to local activist groups for presentations. I am curious what Indigenous, migrant workers and sex workers’ rights groups will do with their allotted shipping containers. I would just light mine on fire and display the charred, empty interior and declare it a protest of racism, particularly as exhibited in Trump’s response to Charlottesville.

The other major Nuit Blanche series, Taking To The Streets, might also be considered political. Organized by the important Toronto curator Barbara Fischer, its eight projects incorporate many different events and locations, but the one with the greatest potential to centre on the political involves an all-night festive performance organized by Deanna Bowen.

Won’t Back Down is based on the 2016 Black Lives Matter march from Toronto Police Headquarters to Queen’s Park. Other politically charged works Fischer has curated include a projection of images of dancers depicting the struggles between police officers and the bodies of protestors by Annie MacDonell. There is also a holographic video projection, Spectre Of The Future Accused, by Leah Modigliani, of hardly remembered Canadian Socialist William Arthur Pritchard appropriately at Marshall McLuhan’s Coach House.

Of all Fischer’s projects, the least political is her own creation, Horses. Here, the curator becomes the artist. Her intention is to bring horses back to the streets of Toronto. My presumption is that they will not be allowed to roam freely through the wilds of our city, but will have handlers. The lyrical expression of the free animal in the city quickly becomes rather a symbol of control and authority: the only horses walking the streets of Toronto these days are employed by the police and often used to quell protests.

I am sure many of the displays for this year’s Nuit Blanche will be meaningful, many political and some even just fun. The all-night DJ party at City Hall – how could this not be fun?

But as much as I want political art, my question to these works based in the overtly political is “Will art not suffer in the name of didacticism?”

In the expanded territory of what is art, these works conceptually excel but, like so much conceptual art, have little consideration of the object, its sculptural basis.

I don’t want to be nostalgic, but in the first year of Nuit Blanche, when part of it took place on Queen West, then the home of artists and their studios before condo builders drove them out, both the politics and the aesthetics were presented.

Istvan Kantor rented a crane to lift a large display monitor and screamed a call for revolution into the night, all night. Rebecca Belmore poetically constructed an installation with melted ice in the long-gone car wash on Queen at Dovercourt. These were political, poetic and engaging works of art, transitory public sculptures embodying the essence of what both temporary or permanent public art should possess.

Eldon Garnet is an artist and writer. His last two works were published anonymously.